Napoleon

THE RICKEY MYTH

Rickey didnt
free the slaves;

April 16 baseball marks the 60th anniversary of Jackie
Robinsons debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, honoring Branch Rickey as
one of the saints of baseball, if not American,
history.

Its one of the great myths of baseball that have become so
enshrined as facts that they are steadfastly believed more than
the truth.Robert Redford is
planning a film on Rickey.Will
he feed the myth or challenge it?

The next nickel
Rickey pays for Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Joe Black,
or Junior Gilliam will be the first.These ex-Negro Leaguers led Brooklyn
to five pennants in nine years, 1947-55, and Rickey snatched them all from
their black owners for free.

Its like coming into a
mans store and stealing the goods right off the shelves, said
Cumberland Cum Posey, owner of the Washington Homestead
Grays.

Rickey was not the games
Abe Lincoln; he was its Jesse James.

The Jackie Robinson revolution was
a blessing to black players.But
it was a disaster to black owners, who saw their life investments wiped
out.

Rickey did pay a pittance (reported at 1,000 to 3,000 dollars) for
pitcher Dan Bankhead.

However, when he tried to steal Monte Irvin from the
Newark Eagles,
whence he had stolen Newcombe, their glamorous owner, Effa Manley, threatened
to sue.Branch dropped Monte
like a hot foul tip.It never
occurred to him to pay her a fair price for him.

His excuse was that Monte, just back from the Army, thought his skills
had declined and had turned Rickeys offer
down.There are several holes
in this story.First, whoever
heard of a player, black or white, saying he didn't want to play in the Major
Leagues because he wasn't good enough?Sec, Monte had the best year of his life in 1946, leading the league
with .411.Third, in 1948 he
batted .313 but allegedly felt he was at last ready for the
majors.

The whites called the black owners
racketeers.Many of them
were gambling kings; it was one of the few ways a black man could
raise enough capital to buy a team -- without gamblers there would have been
no Negro Leagues.But
Robinsons owner, JL Wilkinson, was not a
gambler.Neither was Posey.

When Rickey stole their players, he himself became a bigger racketeer
thany any black owner had been.

Branch made a show of his
Christianity.He had promised
his mother he would never play ball on Sunday; however this didn't prevent
him from religiously depositing the Dodgers Sunday gate receipts in
the bank every Monday morning.

There are several ways to live a Christian
life.One is not to play ball
on Sunday.Another is to do
unto others as you would have others do unto
you.Branch Rickey passed the
first testHe flunked
the second cold.

He was not a revered Methodist saint.He was a pious Methodist hypocrite.

When Rickey had been general manager of the St
Louis Cardinals in 1939 and 42, there was some excitement
in the press about signing black players to the
Pittsburgh Pirates,
Washington
Senators, and other big league teams.Rickeys voice was notably silent.

Not until the death of hard-line
CommissionerKenesawMountain Landis in 1944
did Rickey feel it was safe to speak up.

There were many other players, mostly villains, in baseballs integration
drama:

Happy
Chandler.Rickey not only stole the
players.He stole the credit
for stealing them.That credit
properly belonged to the commissioner who replaced
Landis, AB
Happy Chandler of
Kentucky.Blacks feared he would be a southern
racist, but he surprised them by declaring on the morning of his election,
Hell, yes, if a black boy can make it on
Guadalcanal, he can make it in
baseball.It was banner
news in the black press and the green light for Rickey to begin his
raids.

Chandler
paid the price for his courage.As
soon as the owners could, they fired
him.Rickey didn't raise a finger
to help him.

But
Chandlers
hands were not clean either.He
fought all attempts to institute a long-overdue union for the players, who
were paid a fraction of their real economic value (Joe DiMaggio received
$30,000 the year he hit in56
straight games).
Chandler never insisted that Rickey pay
for the players he was plundering from the black
leagues.And he punished white
players who jumped to
Mexico in pursuit of
mega-pesos there; it was all right for Rickey to raid the Negro Leagues for
free, but not for
Mexico
to raid the big leagues by offering the players a better
deal.

Bill
Veeck.The flamboyant
owner of the
Cleveland
Indians followed Rickey into the market, buying Larry Doby from Manley for
$10,000.She was grateful to
get it, although she said, You know you would have paid me more if
he had been a white boy.

Veeck reportedly paid Wilkinson $5,000 for Satchel Paige, who repaid Bill
a thousand-folded by drawing sell-out crowds wherever he pitched and winning
six crucial games as the Indians won the 1948 pennant in a
playoff.The cynical might say
that Bill wouldn't sign Satch in 47, when he was still under contract
to the Monarchs, but waited until 48 when the Monarchs were almost
dead and Paige had left them.

Scholars also debunk Veecks story that he had earlier tried to buy
the
Philadelphia
Phils and stock them with Negro League
stars.This is now regarded
as a great showmans self-promoting hokum.

Cool Papa
Bell.The self-effacing
Bell was
one of several black veterans who patiently coached Robinson to make sure
he would clear the big league hurdle; they knew that if he failed, it might
be decades before a black would get another
chance.They told him he didn't have the arm or range to play
shortstop and that hed better switch to second
base.Bell, perhaps the fastest
man to put on spiked shoes, also showed Jack the tricks of evading the tag
and bouncing back to his feet, ready to take another base in case of an
error.

Bell also
scouted Ernie Banks and Elston Howard.He was paid with a basket of fruit and ended his days as a
janitor.The Majors would hire
only one black veteran as a coach, John Buck
O'Neil.The rest were cast aside
as coaches, as they had been ignored in their prime years as
players.

Jackie
Robinson.He was just
as self-centered as Rickey.One
of his first acts as a big leaguer was to sneer at the Negro Leagues for
traveling by bus all night or staying in second-rate black hotels and said
he was glad to be out of them.It
wasn't said in sympathy.(It wasn't our fault, Manley
retorted.)

Not once did Jackie thank the owners who had kept the leagues alive through
the Depression, giving him the showcase to jump to the
majors.Nor did he thank the
veteran players, who had helped him enter the promised land while they stayed
behind on Mt Pisgah and cheered his success.

Willie Mays was different.You were the pioneers, he told a reunion of old-timers,
you taught me to survive, you made it possible for
us.Robinson didn't say
anything like that.

JL Wilkinson,
the
white owner of the Kansas
City Monarchs.For 30 years Wilkie traveled with his players, shared their hardships,
and mortgaged his home to meet his payroll the first of every
month.Just as the end of World
War II brought promise of an economic boom, Rickey stepped in and shattered
that prospect by plucking Robinson from the Monarchs.

Wilkinsons partner urged him to sue, but Wilkie
refused.I won't stand
in the way of a man who has a chance to better himself, he said quietly.

In all, Wilkinson lost some 30 men to the white majors  Robinson,
Paige, Banks, Howard, Hank Thompson, and
others.He got almost nothing
for them.He would die, blind
and infirm, in a nursing home at the age of 90, greatly mourned by all his
old players.

Bowie
Kuhn.In 1969 at the
height of the civil rights turmoil that was tearing the nation
apart,the head of the ACLU, Ira Glasser, and I called on the
commissioner to ask that the Hall of Fame open its doors to Satchel Paige
andother greats of the Negro
Leagues.Kuhn sent an attorney
to meet us.The attorney listened
to us, then retired for consultations, after which he informed us that the
Hall is a private organization and therefore not subject to the Interstate
Commerce clause of the Constitution.Thus, he said, Kuhn declined to support our plea.

It was therefore left to someone else to speak for the conscience of the
game.

Ted
Williams.Foul-mouthed
womanizer he may have been, but Ted had the humanity to say what nobody else
in baseball would:It was time
to open the doors of Cooperstown to the
Negro Leaguers.I'm proud
of that, he boomed  Ted didn't say things, he boomed
them.As I look back on
my career, he told a lunch in his honor at Howard university in 1970,
I often wonder what I would have done if I couldn't play
baseball.A chill goes down
my back when I think I could have been denied all this if I'd been black.

So the history of baseball integration was not a simple moralistic tale
of two heroic, saintly men.It
was a tale of many men, of greed and rapacity, courage and timidity, leavened
by flashes of magnanimity.

Yet the miracle of integration did take
place.If one seeks a divine
plan, it

may be that out of the all-too-human failings of sinners and hypocrites,
the miracle was brought forth.Rickey probably would not have freed the slaves if he had had to pay
a fair price for them.But,
whatever his true motivation was, he was the instrument by which the miracle
was accomplished.